http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
THE thought is on just about everybody's mind.
But it is on almost no one's lips. It is a fearsome
thought--and, recklessly deployed, could be
hurtful. Perhaps given the blow to our country's
security, it is inevitable that it will be reflected
in various policing initiatives--some just,
some not. There are, however, consequences to
not acknowledging the thought, and they are
akin to a person not being able to envision
a tumor in his own body.

In October 1936, during
the Spanish civil war, the fascist General Emilio
Mola Vidal, commanding four columns marching
on Madrid, was asked by foreign journalists
which of the columns would take the capital.
According to historian Hugh Thomas, Mola responded
that it would be the "fifth column," a cadre
of secret Nationalist supporters already in
the city. And that is where the term originated.

Does the United States house a fifth column?
Not exactly in the way the Spanish Republic
did. But if our intelligence agencies are to
be believed, we probably do house more people
who wish to kill us. They may (or may not) be
small in number, but if they are deft--and the
butchers of September 11 certainly were--then
they need not be numerous. And these killers
are not randomly distributed throughout the
population. They are disproportionately located
in certain religious and ethnic communities.
And therein lies the dilemma.

Writing in Slate about acceptable police
responses to September 11, Michael Kinsley argues
that "[r]acial profiling and affirmative action
are analytically the same thing.... The only
difference is that in one case the special treatment
is something bad and in the other it's something
good.... [T]he considerations are practical.
How much is at stake in forbidding a particular
act of discrimination? How much is at stake
in allowing it?" For Kinsley (as for most Americans
now), this is a no-brainer: "[W]e're at war
with a terror network that just killed 6,000
innocents and has anonymous agents in our country
planning more slaughter. Are we really supposed
to ignore the one identifiable fact we know
about them?"

Obviously not, and this is the conclusion
of even those Americans most sensitive to racial
profiling's dangers. According to a Gallup Poll,
as reported in The Boston Globe, 71 percent
of black respondents said they favor requiring
Arabs to submit to more intensive airport security
checks than others. Whites, Hispanics, and Asians
feel the same, their different political experiences
and inclinations overwhelmed by a common surge
of vulnerability and national purpose. (Sixty-four
percent of African Americans also endorsed special
ID cards for Arabs--a very ugly idea, and one
that over time will almost certainly disappear
from public consideration.) Everybody is threatened
by militant Islam, and that threat has palpably
brought people together in a way that must mystify
the ideologues of cultural separatism. Decades
ago the phenomenon of hyphenated Americans strained
civic patriotism. But as New York mourned, every
hyphenation served as an enriching additive,
even--or perhaps especially--that most recent
and fraught hyphenation: African American. Since
the attacks, the racial antipathies that lurked
in our big cities have been transcended. I saw
in New York's Union Square a strapping, young
black man and a beefy Irish cop tenderly but
firmly hugging each other for several long minutes,
and crying. These are the wages of our collective
pain, and they will last.

So, for the first time in a long while, the
questions of acceptance, resentment, and belonging
that vex America are not questions between blacks
and whites. They stem instead from that seemingly
happier and easier American narrative: voluntary
immigration to our shores--in particular, immigration
from those places now besieged by fundamentalist
Islam. The governments of the Arab world have
been surprisingly effective and unsurprisingly
brutal in their attacks on their religious zealots,
and that has forced many of the people who deeply
hate America to flee here for survival. As I
wrote in an editorial after the first World
Trade Center attack eight years ago:

There are many aggrieved people in the world,
and millions of these aspire to become Americans.
The early Arab migration was of this sort.
Mostly Christian but not all, it brought to
these shores people fleeing famine and, as
the Ottoman Empire tottered and finally collapsed,
others fleeing perfervid faith and perfervid
nationalisms. Like other newcomers, these
Arab arrivals had bought themselves a psychological
one-way ticket to America, putting the past
behind them and making, more or less, a clean
break with the old world. Another wave came
in the late '60's and after, impelled to move
by the evaporating myths of the Nasserist
state and Arab socialism. Even if they nostalgically
clung to one myth or another of Middle Eastern
politics, they quickly made themselves and
their children belong here.

But this cannot be said about many in the
last large contingent of Arab immigrants,
not a few of them illegals. They also were
fleeing from the fires of their world. But
the fires were ones they had helped set. Unlike
their predecessors, they carried the wars
in their hearts with them. Now, a few of them
have brought these wars to American streets.
Surely, terror brings disgust and fear to
the ordinary Arab immigrant. Yet one cannot
deny that there is also an Arab culture in
Brooklyn and Jersey City and Detroit off which
the criminals feed and which gets a grim thrill
from them.

Ours is not a country with which they identify
or whose values they share. The American flag
has been a flag of convenience for them, the
flag of a patsy country that lets them in
without scrutiny, lets them work, go to school,
organize, harangue, hate, and, then, foolishly
tries to fit them into some fanciful mosaic
of gorgeous diversity.

The United States has admitted many more such
people since that editorial was written, in
a process that can charitably be called random.
A long and meticulous article by Thomas Farragher
and Alice Dembner in last Sunday's Boston
Globe details the myriad ways in which America's
rules of entry are evaded or simply ignored.
The Immigration and Naturalization Service uses
computers no hardworking college freshman would
tolerate. Visa applications at the American
Embassy in Saudi Arabia (from where many of
last month's terrorists hail) are processed
not by Americans, but by Pakistanis, Sudanese,
and Somalis. Our visa waiver program is a leaking
sieve. Scrupulous observers estimate that there
are as many as 5,000 actual or potential terror
operatives in Britain today, and probably more
in Germany. It's anybody's guess how many reside
in the United States.

Here is one Globe narrative out of
many: "[I]n 1996, Palestinian Lafi Khalil received
a visa from the US consul in Israel that entitled
him to spend up to 29 days traveling through
the United States en route to Ecuador, although
he neither fully completed his application nor
showed proof of a ticket to Ecuador. When he
arrived at JFK Airport ... an immigration inspector
mistakenly granted him a six-month stay under
a tourist visa. Nearly eight months later, Khalil
was arrested in New York City and charged with
planning to bomb the subway system. He later
was convicted of carrying a fake immigration
card."

The Clinton administration paid zero attention
to this problem. And neither has its successor.
In fact, the Bushies have made it worse. Just
this summer the administration admitted into
the country the mufti of Jerusalem, Sheik Ikrema
Sabri, a prominent enthusiast for Islamic terror
whose bloodcurdling sermons inspire the faithful
on Fridays. President Bush also suggested, reasonably,
an amnesty for illegal Mexican immigrants. But
had Mohammed Atta and his comrades not perpetrated
their mass cremations, congressional Democrats
might well have expanded that idea to include
illegal aliens from all over the world, and
this country could have been permanently and
legally saddled with an even larger cohort of
potential killers.

Now, much too late, America will tighten its
immigration procedures. And that tightening
will probably not affect immigrants from every
country equally, nor should it. A traveler,
no less a potential immigrant, with a passport
from Yemen and visas from Lebanon and Qatar
should receive greater scrutiny--not harassment,
but careful scrutiny--than a traveler with a
passport from Chile and a visa from Spain. That
is not racism; it is prudence--an objective
assessment of where the threat resides. To do
otherwise after September 11 would constitute
extraordinary negligence.

But the problem is too broad and too subtle
to be solved even by much more competent immigration
authorities. Even if Americans, rather than
Somalis, interviewed visa seekers in Riyadh,
would they really be able to determine who is
a terrorist in his heart? And what about that
much larger immigrant contingent that will commit
no crime, whose hatred for the United States
is mostly rhetorical. They may not directly
endanger us, but their presence does sap our
civic spirit. And they buoy the few who do the
murdering; they are the sea in which the killer
fish swim. Most Arab- and Muslim-Americans,
to be sure, do not share such hatred. But Arab
communities all across the country are not immune
from the currents swirling in the lands of their
birth. (We have known for years, for instance,
that one university in south Florida was once
a virtual command post for radical Islam in
the United States.) And those lands are--as
the left has been so quick to remind us--filled
with hatred of America and rationalizations
of violence against it and its friends. And
those rationalizations are also heard in the
United States, from some of Arab America's most
prominent leaders.

It is deeply depressing, for instance, that
when the president traveled to the Massachusetts
Avenue Islamic Center in Washington last week,
he could not find a group of prominent Muslims
to accompany him who were not in some way compromised.
Bush stood beside Nihad Awan, a longtime apologist
for Islamic terrorism. One of the Muslim leaders
the president invited to the White House on
September 26 was Salam Al-Marayati, who had
already suggested that Israel was behind the
September 11 bloodletting. (He had previously
defended the 1983 bombing of the Beirut Marine
barracks, which took 241 American lives, as
"a military operation.") Another guest, Muzammil
Siddiqi of the Islamic Society of North America,
last year held the United States responsible
for "feeding the Israeli war machinery" and
warned that "the wrath of God will come." Also
present was Omar Ahmed of the Council on American-Islamic
Relations, which is believed to have close ties
to American front groups for Middle Eastern
terror cells. The Bushies invited Hamza Yusuf
to attend the prayer service at the White House.
But on September 9 Yusuf had prophesied that
a great disaster would soon fall upon the United
States because of its mistreatment of Arabs
around the world (how did he know?). In the
same speech Yusuf asserted that Sheik Omar Abdel
Rahman, who incited the first World Trade Center
attack, was "unjustly tried." This is not to
say that the White House should not have reached
out to American Muslims in the wake of the attacks.
Of course it should have. But not to men who
subtly and not so subtly justify the horror.
It does say something that these were the best
the Bushies could muster. And it is not only
the American government's responsibility to
find such leaders. It is Muslim America's responsibility
to produce them.

Of course, america must upgrade its security
systems. No city in the country has prepared
its residents for a chemical or biological attack.
Our public health service is unprepared. And
there is hardly a public space in America--museums,
libraries, athletic stadiums, universities,
dance clubs, concert halls, theatres--that has
adequate security in place. There has been a
lot of talk in recent days about air marshals
on domestic flights. But what about flights
from abroad? Who will guarantee the reliability
of their crews? We have already experienced
Egypt Air 990, whose pilot--according to a leaked
but curiously never officially released FAA
report--appears to have brought down his craft
with 217 aboard. (Which, of course, the media
suggested couldn't have happened since Islam
forbids suicide.) It takes tremendous vigilance
to prevent a terrorist from boarding a plane.
A friend of mine once bought an El Al phony
student ticket from Rome to Tel Aviv. When he
came to Fiumicino Airport, he was questioned
by an El Al staffer who assesses passenger risk.
"Oh, you're a student. What do you study?" My
friend said he studied architecture. "In what
year was Palladio born?" My friend missed his
plane. Does anyone imagine that the employees
of other Middle Eastern airlines are doing anything
remotely like that?

The grim truth is that we will have great
trouble combating the war that the terrorist
international has now brought to our shores.
We do not really know who these people are.
We do not know what they really want. Their
demands are so abstract and so metaphorical
that almost no one--thank God--has proposed
negotiations with them. And most important,
we do not know what frightens them. They have
merged themselves with our quotidian world.

In an interview with The New York Times
published on October 3, Secretary of State Powell
admitted that the U.S. government received--many
weeks before September 11--reliable but unspecified
advance warning of the forthcoming catastrophe.
Notwithstanding these alerts, the terrorists
still penetrated our borders. Others already
inside the country continued their flying lessons.
Others obtained licenses for transporting hazardous
materials. All those who tried made it through
airport security. The government did not even
block the accounts of known terrorist agents
until nearly two weeks after the atrocity. Our
government was both complacent and inept. The
struggle at home will be as difficult as the
struggle in the mountains of Afghanistan. And
no less
important.

Martin Peretz
is editor-in-chief and chairman of The New Republic. Comment by clicking here.